I called up the Stanford clinic and let them know that I wanted to go ahead with the egg freezing. After some phone tag, the nurse and I finally connected and she set me up for several appointments including a baseline ultrasound, a class to learn about the medications, and a day 5 ultrasound. I drove to the clinic to pick up a schedule showing me when I should start taking birth control pills (which are used prior to the stimulation phase to rest the ovaries), when I should start the stimulation meds, and the tentative date for my egg retrieval.
My first task was to start birth control. I also had to order the medications necessary for the stimulation phase. I learned that getting fertility drugs is not the same as getting most prescriptions. I had assumed I would just be able to use my normal pharmacy, but in fact you have to use a specialty pharmacy that has the special fertility drugs. First I had to call my insurance to learn which specialty pharmacies I could use under my plan. I ended up using Accredo mail order pharmacy though I also had the option of going to a Walgreens Specialty Pharmacy in town.
My meds arrived via overnight fedex, in 3 boxes each filled with a foam ice chest and numerous cold packs. I put all the meds in the fridge and set out the sharps container, syringes, alcohol pads, and needles on a side table. Wow it was a lot of stuff! The clinic had given me a list of all the meds and supplies they had ordered, and advised me to double-check that everything had arrived. I had a hard time doing the inventory because it was all so unfamiliar to me--how was I supposed to know what a 27 gauge needle looked like? I fumbled my way through the inventory as best I could and discovered that the Menopur was missing. I called up the pharmacy and they had no good explanation for why the Menopur hadn’t been shipped, but they shipped it overnight so luckily it arrived in time for the start of my stimulation protocol.
I had my baseline ultrasound after being on birth control for 9 days. I know Dr. Westphal was checking to make sure there were no ovarian cysts; not sure if she was looking for anything else as well. Anyway it went fine. I had my IVF orientation class the same day.
Most of the people in the class were going through regular IVF as opposed to egg freezing. Many women were there with their partners, and one couple even brought a (noisy) child with them. I guess they are struggling with “secondary infertility” which is the term for when a woman already has a child but is having trouble conceiving another one. There was one other girl just doing egg freezing, but I think she was doing it for medical as opposed to elective purposes. She was very young (probably high school age) and had her mom with her, and she only had one ovary. So I suspect that I was the only one there for “elective egg freezing.” I was surprised by how young the women going through IVF looked. Most appeared to be in their thirties, not even necessarily their late thirties.
The class covered a lot of information very quickly: showing the names of all the clinic staff, talking about the different kinds of stimulation protocols, going over what would happen at egg retrieval, talking about semen sample retrieval (since most women were going through regular IVF), what happens post-retrieval for the women going through regular IVF (embryos grown in lab, transferred back into uterus), the wait for pregnancy test after the transfer.
The real meat of the class was the injection training. All the stimulation drugs are injections, so we had to learn how to give ourselves shots! And how to mix up the medications. There are a lot of steps to mixing up Menopur, which comes as a powder and must be mixed with a liquid and put into a syringe. I had trouble keeping up and had to keep looking over at my neighbor to copy what she was doing. We struck up a bit of a conversation. She asked me if I had done any IUIs first. I didn’t know at the time what an IUI was, or that it was something that was frequently tried before moving to IVF. I just said no. I didn’t let on that I was only there for egg freezing because I thought it would be insensitive to mention that to a woman who was clearly there because she was having trouble conceiving.
We practiced giving the shots on oranges. I knew there was no way I would remember all the steps, but luckily we were given a step-by-step instruction sheet to help us. I left the class feeling excited, like I was taking on a new big project.
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